Historically Black Colleges and Universities

While LGBTQ students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are finding more acceptance, many HBCUs still lack inclusive policies and practices designed to end discrimination and bias.

LGBTQ students at HBCUs, mostly African American, grapple with integrating their race, sexuality and gender identity — a particularly thorny challenge at a time when many are also experiencing invisibility, marginalization, homophobia, transphobia and harassment on campus.

The HRC Foundation founded the HBCU Project to address the issues facing LGBTQ students and offer support, guidance and leadership opportunities. It is the only national project that partners directly with HBCUs to foster LGBTQinclusive campuses.

Since 2004, we have partnered with one-third of all HBCUs; trained more than 500 HBCU LGBTQ student leaders; held in-depth convenings for HBCU presidents and senior leaders; and developed an everexpanding network of queer HBCU alumni.

In 2019, we convened our largest HBCU Leadership Summit ever, with 50 LGBTQ students, and launched the first ever HBCU OUTLoud Day, a national awareness day of visibility.

CONSIDER THE CASE OF…

Noah [Perkins], an architecture student at Prairie View A&M University in Texas. A young trans man, Noah began to transition once at college. “Prairie View reached out to me because they could see Noah needed support, and they weren’t sure how to help him,” says Leslie Hall, director of the HBCU Project. “That’s how we met.”

Noah attended his first HBCU Leadership Summit in 2016. Naturally quiet, he kept to himself at first. But his passion for making a difference soon emerged. “You could really see him blossoming,” says Hall. “At the end of that Summit, he delivered a moving speech about how the experience transformed his selfimage and made him confident in his identity as a trans man.” In the years since, Noah has indeed blossomed. He founded Prairie View’s first gay-straight alliance and, in 2019, helped establish the LGBTQ+ Resource Center, making Prairie View the fifth HBCU to have a designated safe space for LGBTQ+ students on campus. Today he is a senior, bound for graduation and engaged to be married.

“If you had met this young man in 2016, you might not have guessed he’d accomplish so much,” says Hall. “The Leadership Summit really brought that out in him.”

THANK YOU TO OUR GENEROUS PARTNERS

The Coca-Cola Foundation David Bohnett Foundation